The present disclosure relates to information retrieval.
Information retrieval systems, such as Internet search engines, help users by retrieving information, such as web pages, images, text documents and multimedia content, in response to queries. The search engine may use a variety of signals to determine the relevance of the retrieved content to the user's query.
Formulating a query that accurately represents the user's informational need can be challenging. For example, users may use query terms which are too general or ambiguous to yield high quality search results. That is, the search engine may return a number of resources which match the user's query, but which are unrelated to the informational need of the user. In such a case, the user may have to enter a number of different queries about the same topic before reaching resources that are of interest to the user.
Search engines may suggest queries to the user, to help the user. Some search engines provide query completions to the user as the user is typing a query.